The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,66
hungry! I want something to eat!”
The sight of his thin eyebrows squeezed in irritation and the corners of his mouth drooping plaintively set Araceli off. A missing mother, a missing father, children expecting to be fed: it was all too much. The pots and pans, the salads and the sauces—that is my work. I am the woman who cleans. I am not the mother.
“I am not your mother!” Araceli shouted, and realized instantly her mistake, because Keenan turned and ran away, screaming, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” His shouts filled the living room and became fainter as he ran deeper into the house. Araceli chased after him, cursing herself and the situation and calling out “Keenan, Keenan” until she found him sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees on the floor of the bathroom, the one he shared with Brandon, with shower curtains depicting a coral reef teeming with tropical fish, and decorative rubber jellyfish affixed to the mirror, a tile-lined annex to the Room of a Thousand Wonders. Tears and mucus cascaded over his cheeks and lips and into his mouth. A very faint, motherly impulse to reach down and wipe his tears and clean his nose gathered in Araceli’s chest, but she resisted it. Instead, she picked up a bar of amber-colored soap and said, “Keenan, mira.”
She held the soap delicately between thumb and forefinger and drew lines on the mirror, making quick, sweeping movements to capture and hold his attention, like those clowns in Chapultepec Park who squeezed and stretched balloons into dogs and swords. In less than a minute she had produced a creature on the glass. It floated in the multidimensional space between Keenan and his reflection, ghostly and amber, and he stopped crying the moment he realized what it was.
“A dragon,” he said.
“Yes. A dragon,” Araceli said, her mouth bursting open into a rare display of happy teeth. “For you, Keenan.”
The boy wiped the tears from his face and considered the fanciful animal, which had been rendered in half flight, seemingly ready to pounce.
“That’s really tight,” he said.
“I’m going to make you pancakes,” Araceli said. “Pancakes with bananas. You like that, no? Nice?”
He nodded. After she had coaxed the boy back to the kitchen and served him chocolate milk, after she had prepared the banana pancakes and served them with generous portions of Grade AA authentic Canadian maple syrup, and after the boys had left the kitchen for the entertainments of Saturday morning television, Araceli was once again alone with the telephone list on the refrigerator.
Below Scott’s cell phone on the list of emergency numbers there was Scott, office, which she called even though it was Saturday. “We are currently closed. Our office hours are …” Next was Mother, meaning Maureen’s mother, a woman with cascading ash-colored hair who had visited this home three times since Araceli began working here, most recently in the days after Samantha was born. She was a reserved woman whose main form of communication was the lingering, considered stare, and she had rarely spoken more than a few curt words at a time to Araceli. There had been one unguarded moment, though, during the older woman’s first visit to this house, when she had encountered Araceli in the kitchen and said, “You’re lucky to have this job. You know that, right?” The house on Paseo Linda Bonita was a freshly minted masterpiece then, the virgin furniture was free of child-inflicted scratches, the walls were freshly painted, and la petite rain forest still resembled a small, transplanted corner of Brazil. “Working with my daughter and grandchildren, in this amazing house. I hope you appreciate it.” The words contained an odd patina of regret and envy: as absurd as it sounded, Maureen’s mother resented Araceli for working in this home in daily proximity to her daughter, for the perceived intimacy of their relationship. I could cook and clean too, the old woman was saying without saying it, as good as, if not better than, you, Mexican woman. I could live in the small house in the back and see my grandchildren every day, but of course my daughter won’t have me.
For Araceli to call this gringa acomplejada and ask to be rescued was a measure of the desperation of the moment.
Araceli punched in the number. “The area code for this number has changed,” said a recorded voice. ¿Cómo? She tried the number again and heard the same message, then tried it again with the new area code but this time heard three